The Power of Stories

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

From the first century, the church's mission has been to be the Body of Christ in the world. As such, we are called to be peacemakers; to break down the dividing walls of hostility, suspicion, fear, and prejudice; and to rehearse the reign of God on earth in our communities each day. Yet studies show that over 90 percent of American Christians worship in congregations in which 90 percent or more of the congregants there are like them (Chaves, 1999). Why is this true? In an increasingly multicultural America, and in an ever-shrinking global community, how can the church do ministry on this new religious frontier?

I am convinced that this is a question of leadership. Prophetic, purposeful, visionary leadership by courageous, compassionate, convicted leaders can grow and sustain congregations that reflect the rich diversity of God's reign. Leaders can, through their preaching, teaching, and developing other leaders, story a compelling vision in which cultural diversity is an ethical and moral imperative in the present, not a heaven-bound hope for the future. Although it is true that less than 5 percent of the three hundred thousand Christian congregations in America are intentionally multiracial and multicultural, I believe that each one of them is a pocket of the promise of the soon-coming realm of God (DeYoung et al., 2003). The promise is compelling, and working to tear down racial and cultural segregation in America is a moral imperative for the church. The civil rights movement of the twentieth century was launched by congregational leaders; moral conviction and visionary leadership were keys to their success. Even in the face of counterstories in our culture that suggest acceptance of the status quo, congregational leaders can develop and sustain culturally diverse communities that reflect a vision of the peaceable realm. The testimony and witness from stories of leaders on this new religious border can help us all learn to embrace more effectively the diversity in our midst and to teach our congregants to do the same. This book will share those stories and give you some very practical help to plan and execute this prophetic and purposeful work. It will also help you train other leaders in your context; clergy and laity must do this together.

What can we learn from the stories of clergy who are successfully leading multiracial and multicultural congregations? How did they develop as leaders, and what does that teach us about leadership development? What can their stories tell us about the formation of culturally diverse faith communities of our own? Along with the commitment to proclaim the good news, what other capacities do leaders need in order to help congregations live out an ethic of love and welcoming that creates one family of God? Since real leadership means developing other leaders in a system, how do we preach, teach, plan worship, and develop leaders along the way? These are the questions this book will address.

These questions took me to several congregations in search of a model. Middle Collegiate Church in Manhattan caught my imagination. It was Easter Sunday morning, and a jazz quintet was playing on the steps outside before I walked in. Once inside, a multiracial staff in red silk robes greeted me with warmth; several laypeople greeted me as well. The people were spectacular in their diversity; they truly represented the reign of God. There were senior citizens and children; blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos; couples and families of all configurations, including interfaith couples. The music was outstanding! And there was dance and puppets! The pastor, Gordon Dragt, had agreed to let me study him and his congregation. How did this middle-aged white guy from Michigan hold together such diversity? How did people feel so welcomed, and what made them stay? Gordon and Middle Church, along with four other leaders and their congregations, let me study their stories for my doctoral work; in this book, you will study them as well. I will share what I learned from the clergy and congregations in my study, from my consulting practice at the Alban Institute, and from reading for this project. I will also share what I am now putting into practice in my ministry.

One of the things I learned is that leaders of multiracial and multicultural congregations seem to have in common some aspects of identity, formed by certain environmental, social, and psychological factors, which make them resistant to the dominant culture's views on openness and diversity. They are able to be empathic, to fully welcome the other, to hold together cultural diversity, to manage the conflict and change issues that often accompany difference, and to help others do the same. They celebrate and embody the church's multicultural and multiracial mission. We will spend some time analyzing their identity development because I think there are implications in it for developing the leadership capacities needed in culturally diverse congregations. Leaders can be taught to lead, so we will discuss implications for your own leadership, and for other leaders in your context as well.

This is a narrative analysis, with stories and storytelling at the core, because people of faith are people of texts. As such, along with texts from psychology, sociology, congregational development, ethics, leadership studies, and literary criticism, I studied living texts—leaders and congregations. I used the interdisciplinary sources above to exegete, or make meaning, of the living texts. It was fascinating to find wisdom across disciplines that could be applied to leadership in congregations. I learned so much from this work, and you will too! When you are finished with it, you will have

1. Explored the identity stories of five clergy leaders, along with the development of their ethics and vision for multicultural and multiracial ministries. We will specifically explore the ethics of welcome, conflict, truth telling, border crossing, and social justice. How did these leaders get to be who they are? What can we learn from their journeys in terms of developing leadership in emerging multiracial and multicultural contexts?

2. Explored the leadership capacities necessary for envisioning and sustaining culturally diverse communities and coauthoring the vision with congregants. How have these leaders managed holding together cultural diversity? How have these leaders navigated the cultural borders in their contexts?

3. Created a map to explore your own identity, your awareness of self and other, and your leadership style. How did you get to be you? What gifts and passions do you already have for this work, and what capacities do you need to develop?

4. Explored best practices and received practical tools for prophetic preaching, purposeful teaching and planning, and developing leaders in your context. You will also have explored tools for managing conflict, change, and growth. Wherever you are in the process, what else besides God's power do you need to do now to create your own culturally diverse community?

Before we exegete the stories of these leaders and their congregations, I would like to do a few things. First, I will say more about my core thesis: people and congregations are formed by stories; leadership can create and sustain multiracial and multicultural congregations by storying the vision through prophetic preaching, purposeful teaching, leadership development, and planning. Second, I will discuss the tensions in the predominant culture; there are counterstories that undermine the building of multiracial and multicultural communities. Third, I will tell you about some of the sources that will help us analyze, or exegete, the stories of our leaders and their congregations.

LIVING TEXTS: A THESIS

Even though there are many ways to conceptualize identity development, I am working from a frame in which identity is formed by stories received from our culture via our families, our peers, and our history. By stories, I mean the telling, enacting, or embodying of historic and mythical events. Stories make meaning for people; they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I believe our identities are formed by stories told to us, about us, and around us. We are living texts, formed by multiple, interweaving, competing, and, sometimes, conflicting stories that we receive from our culture via our parents, other adults, our peers, the media, and congregational life. Stories about race, gender, theology, generational differences, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and class work consciously and unconsciously to form our identity. Stories also teach us values, ethics, and meaning. Stories help us know who we are and who we are not; they create boundaries, or borders, for us. Identity development can be thought of as the process of refining, editing (redacting), and authoring one's own story in conversation with others. We find our identity in particular contexts—home, school, the marketplace, or church, to name a few. We can think of each of those contexts as a holding environment. Whereas the first holding environment is the mother's womb, we continue to develop in holding environments all along our adolescence and throughout adulthood. Individual and group identities are formed in holding environments, or containers.

Congregational leaders help form and re-form identity with the stories they rehearse about the peaceable realm of God. Using sacred texts and other texts as sources, leaders weave together congregants' stories, cultural stories, and the story of God's relationship with humanity to answer existential questions and make meaning of life. Paraphrasing Fosters Brooks (The Expository Times, vol. 74, no. 9 [1963]: 257–60), leaders preach, teach, and train leaders through their personalities; they story the vision through their own living texts. Leaders are griots—storytellers who preach, teach, and train leaders through their own complex identity stories.

I am suggesting that, as we study the living texts of leaders of multiracial and multicultural congregations, we find they have some identity traits, or storylines, in common. Discovering how they came to be has implications for how to train other leaders because development is an ongoing process. We will also discover core competencies required on multiracial and multicultural borders and how to develop those in ourselves and in others.

In upcoming chapters, we will discuss those storylines the study leaders have in common. We will also discuss how leaders on the border need to narrate the good news in more than one cultural language, verbal and symbolic. They need to be multivocal and develop a congregational identity in which cultural diversity is a moral imperative.

Let me pause here to say that although I am interested in the ways the overlapping storylines of race and ethnicity, gender, class, and theology and ethics (theo-ethics) form the identity development of leaders, I decided to focus on racial/ethnic and theo-ethical identity for this study because (1) one cannot talk about multiracial churches without talking about race and (2) the theology and ethics of leaders in congregations are at the core of this work.

RACE IN AMERICA: A COUNTERSTORY

Christian biblical images of the peaceable realm are abundant: Isaiah's prophecy of a time when lions will lie down with lambs; Paul's teachings on the equality of male and female, Jew and Gentile, and slave and free; and John's challenge to love the neighbor whom we can see as an expression of the love of God whom we cannot see all echo the gospel teachings of Jesus. Love is the ethic of Jesus of Nazareth— love of God, neighbor, and self. Jesus, Paul of Tarsus told us, is our peace, the one whose love breaks down walls of hostility that separate people. The church, as the Body of Christ, is called and commissioned to break down those walls wherever we encounter them. It is our mission, and we understand that.

Thus, every Sunday morning in American churches, bulletins, greeters, and signs on the door offer messages of welcome. Yet what is often meant by welcome is that strangers can come in as long as they look like us, don't offend us, don't challenge us, and work heroically to fit in with our communal sense of self. In American culture, what we are likely to be made uncomfortable by are racial and ethnic differences, generational differences, theological differences, or differences due to sexual orientation. But, as psychologist Robert Carter argues, what matters most in American culture is race (Carter, 1995).

Though American congregations share the call to welcome, in fact only 7.5 percent of the over three hundred thousand Christian congregations in the United States are multiracial and multicultural, which means no one racial or ethnic group makes up more than 80 percent of its members (DeYoung, Emerson, Yancey, and Kim, 2003). Even churches with a sincere desire to diversify may encounter barriers, such as location, language, and worship style. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s observation that eleven o'clock on Sunday mornings is the most segregated hour in America still stands to challenge each congregation to examine the difference in its midst and to develop a higher capacity and moral compass to embrace it and to celebrate it.

The gospel message is clear, yet relatively few clergy are able to lead their congregants into this vision of shalom. Clergy do not lead in a vacuum; they work in a context and in a culture that is often counter to the gospel. In other words, the vision we are called to story is often met with resistance that needs to be navigated. We must learn to cross cultural borders and break down resistance to a radical ethic of welcome.

Before we can understand how clergy leaders can tell compelling stories that break down the walls that divide God's people, we must first understand that the identity stories of leaders and congregants are formed and re-formed in the context of larger stories, or metanarratives. One such story, for example, is the broader story of the American cultural landscape and, specifically, the cultural issues that affect American religion.

The Story of American Culture and Congregations

America's story is shaped by the stories of many peoples: some born here, some who were forced here, some who chose to come here in search of land, and a place to thrive, some forced off the land that was "discovered." Most of America's peoples, it might be said, yearn for the story that has been called the American dream. That story promises equality to a broad diversity of races and ethnicities and accommodates differences in physical and mental ability, gender and sexual orientations, religions and beliefs. That story promises the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That story promises freedom to live, work, learn, play, and grow where one chooses. That story promises that each of us can worship the God of our choice, in the way that we choose, or to choose not to believe in God at all.

America's history details the tensions between the dream story and reality. In short, the experiment that is cultural diversity in American life is riddled with difficulties. Whether one thinks of America as a melting pot, a salad, a mosaic, or a stew, many communities are still quite racially and economically segregated. Discrimination rears its ugly head in the form of hiring practices and hate crimes. Tolerance for the faith practices of others is sometimes strained at best, and when it is pushed too far, intolerance erupts in defaced synagogues, hate crimes directed toward Muslims, and burned-down churches.

Our country's increasing diversity adds more complexity to the story of how we will live together in the future. As Diana Eck (2001) points out, today the percentage of foreign-born Americans is greater than ever before, even during the peak of immigration a century ago. By most United States census projections, somewhere between 2030 and 2050, visible racial and ethnic minority groups will surpass the population of whites in America, due to immigration patterns and differential birthrates (U.S. Census Bureau, 1992; Sue and Sue, 1999). In the last decade of the twentieth century, the Hispanic population grew 38.8 percent and has surpassed the African American population. In the same time period, the Asian population grew 43 percent (Eck, 2001). In terms of religious diversity, research from Eck's Pluralism Project reveals that in America today, there are about six million Muslim Americans, equal to the number of Jews, but greater than the number of either Episcopalians or Presbyterians. Each year, some twenty thousand Americans convert to Islam, and in this post–September 11, 2001 world, hate crimes against Muslims are on the rise as well. The browning of America, the shrinking of the distance between America and the rest of the world, and ever increasing tensions among Christians with differing theologies strain race, ethnic, and faith group relations in our country. Those strained relations affect all of our identity stories.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Power of Storiesby Jacqueline J. Lewis Copyright © 2008 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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